AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19951&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
A Trenchant Tale of Two States

In Texas, the payroll count is back to prerecession levels. California is nearly 1.5 million jobs in the hole. Why such a difference? Chalk it up to taxes, regulation and attitude, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD).

California's business climate is notoriously bad.

CEOs polled by the magazine Chief Executive have ranked it dead last for the past five years, with Texas, naturally, ranked first.

To anyone seeking to start an enterprise and hire workers, moving to Texas is a lot less trouble than trying to change California's high taxes, overregulation and not-so-subtle bias against the profit motive.

The difference in tax systems reflects a difference in attitudes toward business and the wealth that business generates.

Capital gains are tax-free in Texas; in California, they are taxed up to 10.55 percent.

To an entrepreneur choosing where to set up shop, the message is clear: Texas wants to reward success; California wants to tax it.

California also has developed a web of regulations that raises labor costs, spurs litigation and ties up building projects indefinitely.

Just how pervasive is the state's antibusiness attitude? Consider a recent story about how some governments in the San Francisco Bay Area are gouging the solar power business, says IBD.

If California officialdom stands for anything, it stands for renewable energy, against Big Oil and for "green jobs." Yet an informal survey by the Sierra Club found that some cities were charging sky-high fees for solar installations on schools, churches, retail stores and other buildings.

That just about says it all -- we're all for solar, but we can't have people making money off it, now can we? As long as California officials can say something like that with a straight face, the state faces a very long slog back to prosperity, says IBD.

Source: "A Trenchant Tale of Two States," Investor's Business Daily, October 14, 2010.

I have a favor to ask, especially of those here who frequent the non-right, progressive, or liberal blogs or sites. Juan Williams has been fired by NPR due to his response to some questions on O'Reilly's show. His colleagues on the right are viciously defending him (Juan is considered a progressive commentator). How are those on the left responding? Links would be appreciated.

JM

P.S. There is video at the above site where Juan describes his dismissal.

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19865&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
Only Trade-Fuelled Growth Can Help the World's Poor

Current experience and history both speak loudly that the only real engine of growth out of poverty is private business, and there is no evidence that aid fuels such growth, says William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and codirector of its Development Research Institute.

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), only the eighth faintly recognizes private investment, through its call for a "nondiscriminatory trading system." Yet the trade-related MDG received virtually no attention from the wider campaign, has seen no action and even its failure has received virtually no attention.

This is all the more misguided because trade-fuelled growth not only decreases poverty, but also indirectly helps all the other MDGs. Yet in the United States alone, the violations of the trade goal are legion, says Easterly.

U.S. consumers have long paid about twice the world price for sugar because of import quotas protecting about 9,000 domestic sugar producers; the European Union is similarly guilty.

Equally egregious subsidies are handed out to U.S. cotton producers, which flood the world market, depressing export prices.

According to an Oxfam study, eliminating U.S. cotton subsidies would "improve the welfare of over one million West African households -- 10 million people -- by increasing their incomes from cotton by 8 to 20 percent."

The U.S. government, for its part, announced recently its "strategy to meet the millennium development goals." The proportion of this report devoted to the U.S. government's own subsidies, quotas and tariffs affecting the poor: zero.

It is already clear that the goals will not be met by their target date of 2015. One can already predict that the ruckus accompanying this failure will be loud about aid, but mostly silent about trade. It will also be loud about the failure of state actions to promote development, but mostly silent about the lost opportunities to allow poor countries' efficient private business people to lift themselves out of poverty, says Easterly.

Source: William Easterly, "Only Trade-Fuelled Growth Can Help the World's Poor," Financial Times, September 21, 2010.

"This is evidence of one-party rule and one sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought."

What a ******* joke.

Then you are wrong.

Membership

Union membership had been steadily declining in the US since 1983. In 2007, the labor department reported the first increase in union memberships in 25 years and the largest increase since 1979. Most of the recent gains in union membership have been in the service sector while the number of unionized employees in the manufacturing sector has declined. Most of the gains in the service sector have come in West Coast states like California where union membership is now at 16.7% compared with a national average of about 12.1%.[7]

Union density (the percentage of workers belonging to unions) has been declining since the late 1940s, however. Almost 36% of American workers were represented by unions in 1945. Historically, the rapid growth of public employee unions since the 1960s has served to mask an even more dramatic decline in private-sector union membership.

At the apex of union density in the 1940s, only about 9.8% of public employees were represented by unions, while 33.9% of private, non-agricultural workers had such representation. In this decade, those proportions have essentially reversed, with 36% of public workers being represented by unions while private sector union density had plummeted to around 7%. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent survey indicates that union membership in the US has risen to 12.4% of all workers, from 12.1% in 2007. For a short period, private sector union membership rebounded, increasing from 7.5% in 2007 to 7.6% in 2008. [8] However, that trend has since reversed. In 2009, the union density for private sector stood at 7.2%. [9]
[edit] Labor education programs

In the US, labor education programs such as the Harvard Trade Union Program [10] created in 1942 by Harvard University professor John Thomas Dunlop sought to educate union members to deal with important contemporary workplace and labor law issues of the day. The Harvard Trade Union Program is currently part of a broader initiative at Harvard Law School called the Labor and Worklife Program[11] that deals with a wide variety of labor and employment issues from union pension investment funds to the effects of nanotechnology on labor markets and the workplace.
[edit] Jurisdiction

Labor unions use the term jurisdiction to refer to their claims to represent workers who perform a certain type of work and the right of their members to perform such work. For example, the work of unloading containerized cargo at United States ports, which the International Longshoremen's Association the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have claimed rightfully should be assigned to workers they represent. A jurisdictional strike is a concerted refusal to work undertaken by a union to assert its members' right to such job assignments and to protest the assignment of disputed work to members of another union or to unorganized workers. Jurisdictional strikes occur most frequently in the United States in the construction industry.[12]

Unions also use jurisdiction to refer to the geographical boundaries of their operations, as in those cases in which a national or international union allocates the right to represent workers among different local unions based on the place of those workers' employment, either along geographical lines or by adopting the boundaries between political jurisdictions.[12]

” I think one of the reasons the hardcore liberals who run NPR terminated Williams is their desire to abort a preference cascade. . . . As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. . .

Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a "Fresh Air" listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.
The manufactured liberal consensus about Islamic terrorism rolled off the assembly line a long time ago. . . .

A credentialed, taxpayer-supported NPR liberal cannot be allowed to question this consensus. It will shatter too easily if the clients of liberalism begin connecting dots between underwear bombers and pistol-packing Army psychiatrists. They cannot be left to nod quietly in agreement with the earnest musings of Juan Williams . . . then look around the room and see all the other faithful liberals nodding at the same time. . . .

Juan Williams came too close to understanding ideas he was supposed to hate. The Left is deathly afraid of what happens when its constituents begin to understand the Right. They didn't like the idea of millions watching an NPR contributor break the biohazard seal on strictly quarantined ideas.”